Future Scouting is another entry in the increasingly crowded world of speculative design, a system for coming up with interesting and helpful ideas about the future. Now, to lay my credentials out, I am a published futurist and I've been working on my own system, Eventuality, to help small groups of people do futures thinking in a reasonable timeframe. So while there is an element of sour grapes, in that Future Scouting exists and Eventuality doesn't it, trust me when I say that this is a hard question, and that when I find the thing the works I'll shout it from the heavens.

With all of that in mind, Future Scouting is adequate but underbaked, a bricolage of techniques grabbed from other speculative design practices. The skeleton is actually pretty solid. Taking your values, grab a hold of an emerging social or technological signal and imagine a near future object, person, and location. Then considered the direct and indirect consequences of the world that you've created. And finally reflect back and sum up.

It's a solid backbone, but Lutz recommends turning to other speculative design sources to come up with the actual meat of provocative issues and trends. If you're stuck or lost, there's not much to get you started. Similarly, while there is a suggestion to reflect and perhaps collaborate with others, there's no structure or reward for doing so.

If you know what you're doing, Future Scouting will likely work, and if you don't, good luck. At the end of the day, there not enough originality or rigor for me to strongly recommend this method.